Inside HRSA, October 2008, Health Resources and Services Administration
 
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HRSA Employees Join Extreme Makeover Team to Help Family in Need

 

Mona Finch, in hard hat, was one of hundreds of volunteers who worked on the house.
Mona Finch, in hard hat, was one of hundreds of volunteers who worked on the house.

 

This past June, Mona Finch and Kristy Muse of HRSA’s Office of Communications joined the team of ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition to build a brand-new home for a needy Montgomery County (Md.) family of 15.

Mona and Kristy volunteered when a local contractor began promoting “the Build” on a Web site created for the event.

Kristy was motivated to help because she had grown up with Cassandra Jackson, sister of Felicia Jackson, head of the family that the team came to Montgomery County to help.

Before dying from cancer four years ago, Cassandra asked Felicia to promise to take care of her 10 surviving children. Felicia kept her promise even though she was already raising her own four kids on a security guard’s salary. Eventually serious financial problems and the reluctance of landlords to rent to such a large family overtook her. As a result, she and the children had been put up in a hotel by the county since December and Cassandra’s children faced the threat of separation and foster care.

Kristy and Mona, whose daughter is a close friend of Felicia’s, met up with the Extreme Makeover crew on June 22 for the type of endeavor that normally takes about four months to complete. But the crew — with the help of hundreds of volunteers, multiple business partners and contractors — committed to build the 4,800-square-foot home in a single week.

While the kids and Felicia reveled at Disney World, where the show had sent them, the makeover team set to work on land in Poolesville deeded to the Jacksons. First they demolished a ramshackle home on the property that Felicia couldn’t afford to rehabilitate.

Worked every day

Kristy worked every day of the project. “I’d leave work and go straight up there, arrive around 4:30 and stay until 9 or 10 o’clock at night,” she said. “On weekends, I’d put in whole days.”

She laid brick on a patio and fire pit and put down sod to fill a huge yard, things she’d never done before. “Later I folded and put away clothes inside the house, worked on the room for the littlest Jackson girls, painted and did anything else I could do to help,” she said. “You never stayed in one spot.”

Mona participated over three of the seven days, after work and all day on the weekend. “We worked until we exhausted ourselves,” she said.

“It was amazing, a 24-hour, nonstop thing. It was coordinated so well, it blew my mind totally! And it was just so hard to leave because there was so much that needed to be done, and it was really easy to see exactly what. As volunteers, our role was simply to pitch in and do it. And the whole thing was driven by the need to get it done before the family came home.”

Coming Home

On homecoming day — the day of “the Reveal,” as the show calls it — there wasn’t a dry eye in the crowd. The family, too, was moved to tears.

But the most amazing thing, as the Sept. 22 episode noted, is that the Jackson family’s new house — by circumstance or design — was built right across the road from mother Cassandra’s grave.

“The kids and Felicia can look out their front windows and see the grave site,” Mona said.

Meet the Jackson Family

For a photo gallery of the construction project, please visit Extreme Makeover: Home Edition Web site.

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